I posted a review of Apple’s “Numbers” software last August:

I haven’t used Numbers yet in a real-world situation, but will over the next semester as I use it to calculate grades in my classes. I am sure there’s a lot more good and not-so-good to be found yet–missing features, extra touches, and so forth. But from just playing around with it for a few days, I am more than ready to dump Excel and work exclusively with Numbers. And with Numbers topping off the iWork suite, I find myself considering simply ditching MS Office altogether and switching completely over to iWork (except for when I have to teach Office in my Computer course).

Let it not be said that I readily admit when I’m wrong. Sure, I’ll usually put up a fight, but when there’s no doubt, there’s no doubt. And I was wrong about Numbers: now that I have used it in real-world situations, I can see that it’s not quite ready for prime time.

And the kicker of it is, it’s in the simple stuff where Numbers falls short. Take, for example, the fact that in Numbers, you can hide columns and rows individually, but you can’t unhide them individually. When working with my class grades (as I just finished doing today), I hid a number of columns, all across the spreadsheet. In Excel, if I want to unhide specific columns, I just select the columns around that one and select “Unhide,” and out it comes. In Numbers: you must unhide every single column in a spreadsheet, or none at all. Which means that if I want to unhide a single column, I have to choose “Unhide All Columns”–I have to bring all of them out, then go about re-hiding all the ones I don’t need, a laborious project. And that’s just stupid–Apple should not have overlooked such an obvious function. Not to mention that there is no menu bar selection for hiding and unhiding, meaning you cannot assign keyboard shortcuts for either command–a big shortcoming for me, as I use those features regularly.

Another example is how you can change formulas. In Excel, when you select a formula, you can see the referenced cells outlined–but then you can grab the outlines and change them, and the formula changes in kind. In Numbers, you can’t do that–you can see the referenced cells as shaded, but you cannot then grab them and change them–instead, you have to re-type the formula itself. Why not do things the easier way?

Numbers
Excel

The strange thing is, these go against Apple’s style, which is to do things more intuitively. These are not arcane features used only by power users, they are basic features that should not have been missed. There are still more intuitive bits in Numbers, like the ability I described last August, where you grab basic functions from the sidebar and drag them to make an easy calculation on the spreadsheet. But the two problems I outlined above are exactly that kind of feature–the easier, more natural, intuitive way of working that Apple should do better, but in this version of Numbers, Apple does very much worse. I can only hope these are oversights, soon to be rectified. But for now, they get in the way far too much, and make using the Apple program difficult and unwieldy.

There are also bugs in the program. For example, I can use the Fill handle to repeat a number, equation, or anything else downward–but not upward. Again, stupid–it should go both ways. Also, when you are in another app and want to go back into Numbers, you naturally click anywhere on the Numbers window that is visible–but this results in the cell you happened to click getting highlighted, as opposed to Excel (and most other apps) which ignores that first app-switching click, keeping the cell that you had left highlighted still in focus–a much better and more intuitive result.

Otherwise, Numbers just feels sluggish. You click, and it takes a second to react. You open a document, and it takes too long to open. The column- and row-manipulation arrows don’t appear as quickly as they should, and are harder to select than they should be. The lack of WYSIWYG font menus doesn’t help, either.

With Numbers being still in version 1.0, I guess I should not be so surprised–it still has a good ways to go, a long lag behind Excel’s functionality, But that doesn’t help me do my work. Sadly, I’ll have to go back to Excel–somewhat but not terribly improved in its 2008 reworking–to do my grunt work, at least until Apple does a lot more to get things right.